Success & Happiness

Every day we go into the world to create and make our way, be it to a job or a business. We enter each day with the attitude of accomplishment and achievement. However, for most people, during the day we meet some sort of obstacles or roadblocks. It could be a customer who changes the scope of the project that you just completed the night before, the bank who needs just one more piece of information to complete the loan you needed yesterday or the guy who cut us off in traffic, caused us to run off the road and miss the most important business meeting of our career. We rise to the occasion as each monster rears its ugly head. Each time, we expend just a little bit more of our energy that we had planned to use on another objective. By the end of the day we are usually one, two or even three steps behind where we wanted to be, worn out and ready to retreat to a place where we have peace and serenity. This also holds true for our children today. They encounter as much stress, be it different, in the their worlds as we adults do. They are stressed by peer pressure to act and be different than they are taught at home and by television and the media to become something that they are not. These stresses can be overwhelming and we are all looking for a place where we can escape from these pressures. If this description sounds familiar Feng Shui may be for you.

If everyday was like the one described above and you were not able to rebuild your energy, you would begin to find yourself running on reserves, feeling exhausted like you can never get ahead of the game. Running on reserves can work for a while if you are still in your 20's and maybe even your 30's but eventually your reserves can be depleted and you are as the song goes +running on empty¦. The stresses of each day are piled upon the stresses of the day before and the day before that, until you no longer have the patience and tolerance to deal with seemingly insignificant issues as they arise. These stresses also can make us feel less then capable, which makes dealing with situations even more difficult. This level of stress when not dealt with can start to impact your performance at work and your ability to nurture and grow interpersonal relationships, leaving you feeling like you are in a rut with no way out.

If your energy levels are at their peak you have a greater chance of successfully creating new opportunities and dealing with the day to day experiences and pressures. Feng Shui can help you. You can have the ability to clearly see and deal with each issue as it is and not through the filter of stress, frustration and feeling less than. This clarity when added to peak performance can assist you in achieving what ever you desire. We all have had those rare days when everything came together, when you were in the right place at the right time, when the answer to all of your bosses questions were on the tip of your tongue. But how did that happen? How can we create this on a daily basis?

To achieve this level of clarity and performance you must have an environment away from the demands and chaos of the everyday world, where you can go to rejuvenate, rebuild your energy and find clarity. Many people think that they can find this state of being on a vacation in Hawaii or some place similar. But, usually this state of being is only temporary. This level of being that you seek must be nurtured on a daily basis in an environment without stress, tension and conflict. A successful environment for nurturing your level of clarity, and performance will be calming, uplifting and healing.

For most, this environment will be your home. The balance and harmony in your home is a critical factor in dealing with these stresses and are important for your success and happiness. When a home feels calming and nurturing, with no distractions, you can quiet the mind and sort out what is important and what is not. You can create new ideas on how to proceed and how to handle obstacles. You can start to see clearly what actions need to be taken. When life is full of complications it is often hard to distinguish the forest from the trees. If you have clarity, you can sort out all of the issues and deal with them one at a time, making clear decisions on each issue instead of complicating each issue with other issues. This type of clarity will also give you the ability to see solutions that you could not see before.

Unfortunately because of the pressures of society to achieve at all costs, some houses today have become purely investments and places to impress clients, customers and friends. These houses have been designed strictly for the purpose of business and that is the master that they serve. In these situations the home is completely ignored, leaving no refuge for the soul to rejuvenate. Notice the usage of the words house and home. A house is just a physical structure, where a home is a physical structure that has been created for the purpose of nurturing the soul. Ironically, if the house were used for the purpose of nurturing and healing the soul, success in the outside world would come much easier. In today's fast pace world it is even more important to create homes instead of houses. Homes designed for business, investment and to keep up with the Jones's, also ignore family identity and intimacy. This loss of family identity undermines the stability of the family and the role models set for children. The loss of intimacy starts to breakdown communication and the core of family relationships. These problems just add to the stress level in the home, complicating our lives.

If we are to be successful in life we must start to address the environment where our ability to succeed is created. As many psychologists have said and most people would agree, +we are products of our environment¦. But what parts of that environment shape us? How is it that some children who come from the worst of neighborhoods are able to rise above the circumstances of their external environment of crime and poverty? How is it that some children who come from homes that are in the best of neighborhoods and have ideal external environments end up with drug or alcohol problems? Are the external factors in our environment like the location that we live in or the size of the home the factors that shape us? No, it has to do with the internal environment we live in. That child rises out of the ghetto because somewhere he/she received a nurturing environment that allowed them to rise above the circumstances.

It is the internal environment we live in that plays an integral part in creating the external aspects of our lives. If your internal environment is one of balance and harmony, a space that is nurturing, where you feel safe, secure and at peace, you can let go of the days challenges and come back to your source of power. Then you can start each new day refreshed and rejuvenated.